


By slight ligaments we are bound (the Talented Mister Remix)

by Aja



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Darkfic, Horror, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 01:10:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15741072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: Arthur has always known himself scarily well.





	By slight ligaments we are bound (the Talented Mister Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CoffeeWithConsequences](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoffeeWithConsequences/gifts).
  * Inspired by [By slight ligaments we are bound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13793304) by [CoffeeWithConsequences](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoffeeWithConsequences/pseuds/CoffeeWithConsequences). 



> Happy remix, Coffee! This is an abysmally late and woefully inadequate gift, but it comes with the deepest admiration. <3

“You know, they say that the longer couples stay together, the more they start to resemble one another,” Ariadne says to him in passing one day. “But I never really got that, until I met you and Eames.”

Arthur just smiles in response.

Later, he tells Eames, when the two of them are fucked-out and resting side by side, Eames running his big hand casually up and down Arthur’s thigh, no intent, just a sort of drowsy petting.

“Ariadne says we’re starting to look alike.”

Eames’s hand halts for a second or two before it resumes its lulling motion again.

“Oh, dear,” Eames says lightly. “To be joining all of your impeccable aesthetics with all of this.”

“You know I love it,” Arthur replies, before he’s thought much about it.

Eames shifts and presses a kiss against his neck.

“Yes, darling,” he says. “I know you do.”

 

 

 

Arthur knows himself. He’s always known himself scarily well, which is why he’s always been, deep-down, so surprised that Eames seems to know him so well, too. Arthur’s not the kind who wears his heart on his sleeve or carries his kinks in his back pocket; very few people have gotten in deep enough to understand the real things that drive him, and of all those who have, Eames — and Mal, in her way — were the only ones who didn’t ultimately recoil from what they found.

They’re doing a job in Tijuana, one of those deliciously sleazy backroom deals where everyone has to deposit their gun on the table before sitting down to negotiate, when Eames — Arthur has _no_ idea how — steals an Egon Schiele and deposits it, neatly wrapped, in Arthur’s hotel room. _You’re bored lately_ , Eames replies when Arthur texts him a row of question marks. _Enjoy figuring out how to get that out of Mexico_.  

And of all things, after all the years of subtle flirtation, that’s the moment Arthur realizes that Eames isn’t just fucking with him.  

It takes him a few weeks, still, to act on it. They’re in Paris, where else, and the circumstances are the polar opposite of Tijuana. They’re at some gala ball for a very posh set of financiers, and Eames is somebody’s grand-nephew from Monte Carlo, very dashing, and Arthur his high-rolling and enigmatically charming boyfriend. They didn’t plan on flirting their way through the night, but it inevitably happens anyway, and so when Eames finally steers Arthur out onto a side balcony overlooking Avenue Montaigne, Arthur is feeling primed and on-edge and a little saucy.

“This is a little highbrow for an assignation for you, isn’t it?” he asks, turning into Eames’ arms before Eames can drop one of his ridiculous innuendos. “Thought you liked to slum it.”

“Oh, darling, but you don’t,” Eames says, winking.

“How do you know?” Arthur retorts, not quite ready to let him move in for the kill.

Eames’ eyes flash. “Because,” he says darkly. “If you did, we’d’ve found our way to the gutter by now.”

 

 

 

At first, Arthur actually thinks Eames is a giving partner in bed. At first, he’s actually surprised by how considerate Eames is, how fully he waits to make sure whatever he’s doing is exactly, _exactly_ , what Arthur wants.

At first.

 

 

 

The thing that has always fascinated Arthur most about Eames is his complete ability to be himself outside the dream. He can absorb any personality, become anyone and anything, inside the dream, but no matter how long a job lasts, no matter how long he has to stay in character, the moment he’s awake it slips off of him like a cast-off suit. There’s no residue from any of the parts he plays, and Arthur always wants to ask how. It’s not that he thinks forging should be like method acting, but he’s not sure how it’s even possible to inhabit another body, another face, without there being some lingering trace after it’s over.

He thinks it must be that the Eames he gets outside the dream is very self-consciously constructed, that all that careless artlessness is as practiced as every bit of Arthur’s self-discipline.

That’s why, at first, it doesn’t unnerve him to see Eames changing — because whatever Eames does outside the dream is a conscious manipulation. So when he starts to notice it, in a casual way, he initially assumes it must be some sort of long game Eames is playing on someone.

He can see the subtle shift in Eames’s fashion styles, away from Duckie Brown and towards Canali, away from baubles and gauds and towards accents and textures. The gradual change in hairstyle, away from the rogue comb-over toward the slicked-back look Arthur always prefers. The shift towards platinum cufflinks away from no cufflinks at all. The new casual but growing interest in databases and blockchains, in bitcoin-mining and online security. The fact that somewhere along the way Eames gives up his habitual foam-topped Starbucks monstrosities and starts drinking only black coffee, straight. The drink choices, the hotel preferences, the music on his phone, the cars he drives, even his mannerisms — Arthur actually laughs when it finally occurs to him, one day when they’re driving through KL in a rented roadster that Arthur should love, and Eames settles his hand on Arthur’s thigh.

There is a long con, there has been all along — only it’s not on anyone else, but on him.

Of course.

 

 

 

He settles back to see what happens, watches it all unfold with a birds-eye detachment that surprises him sometimes when he stops to think about it. Gradually, it stops being something that terrifies him, this slow pursuit of Arthur’s identity. Now Eames’s subtle shifts away from himself and into Arthur are just more links in the chain, and Arthur is waiting to see where the chain leads.

He thinks, often, that Eames knows that he knows, and they both know, and yet they continue.

“Is this all right, darling?” Eames mutters one night when they’re fucking, Eames at his back, rutting into him. It’s rough, and Arthur no longer remembers whether rough is Eames’ preference or his, because he’s starting to forget what Eames likes because he likes it and what Eames likes because he’s siphoning away Arthur’s personality one tiny trait at a time.

“You tell me,” he bites without thinking about it, and Eames stills inside of him and gradually pulls out and shifts Arthur onto his back.

In the dark, Eames’s expression is difficult to make out, but his eyes are glittering, sharp and observant as ever.

“What was that?” he asks, sounding entirely blank, entirely innocent.

“You tell me,” Arthur repeats, staring up at him.

“If you’re not happy,” Eames starts, and then his lips curl, into a smirk or a smile or a grimace, it’s too dark to tell. He lowers his mouth to Arthur’s ear and whispers, “Oh, but I know you are.” He tugs Arthur’s ear lobe into his teeth and nips him, and when Arthur shivers, he hums.

“I know _exactly_ what makes you happy,” he says. “My Arthur.”

He presses his mouth to Arthur’s neck and licks a stripe up Arthur’s throat to the underside of his jawline. When he bites Arthur there, not gentle, Arthur moans and arches against him, hand coming up to grab a fistful of Eames’s hair.

Eames laughs, dark and possessive, and fucks Arthur exactly the way Arthur wants him to.

 

 

 

 

“I wonder,” Arthur tells him one day, apropos of nothing. He’s naked and well-fucked, lying splayed over Eames’s lap while Eames’ hand meanders up and tantalizingly over his thigh.  “Will I still love you when you’re done with whatever this is?”

Eames tilts his head. “Done. With you?” He smirks and pinches Arthur’s calf. “Darling, how could I ever be done with you?”

Arthur slides off him and rolls over, tucking his hands behind his head.

“You don’t need to keep using the pet names,” he says calmly. “I wouldn’t.”

“You’re an enigma today, pet.”

“Not really.”

Eames turns and shifts on top of Arthur, and Arthur notes, not for the first time, that Eames has been losing weight, gradually trading his muscle mass for toning, doing less weight-lifting and more running. He can feel the difference when they’re like this. He doesn’t know why it doesn’t frighten him more.

“Arthur,” Eames says, looking down at him calmly. “If you’ve anything to say to me, just say it.”

Arthur looks back, cataloguing: Pink cupid-bow lips. Too many forehead wrinkles. That godforsaken voice like plush oiled leather. Those muddy green-gray eyes. All the things that can’t be replaced.

 _But where did they come from?_ He thinks, unbidden. _Whose were they before?_

He leans up, kisses Eames hotly, shoving down the roiling sensation of wrongness within him. “Nothing wrong here,” he says, curling his leg around Eames’s thigh.

Eames chuckles and presses him back against the pillows. “You’re overthinking things again.”

“That is what I do.”

Eames nips Arthur’s chin. Arthur distantly adds _those teeth_ to the catalogue.

“You know exactly what you’re doing,” Eames says. “That’s one of the things I love about you most.”

 

 

 

 

Eames continues to lose weight, continues to steadily shift his body definition, and Arthur has never been more aware that they’re the same height, that their hair is virtually the same color, that they have the same military background, the same love of guns and fast cars, the same way of honing in on the same problems at the same moments, even if they traditionally have arrived at polar opposite solutions. They even do that less and less these days; on a job in Reno, Eames almost preternaturally pops up with a suggestion for socially engineering a mark’s mind that’s exactly what Arthur was about to suggest himself, and Arthur stares at him for a moment and finally says, “We can try that,” perversely satisfied when Eames’s eyes narrow.

The sex gets darker.  Eames gets more dominant, makes him bruise and bleed a few times, and that’s exactly what Arthur wants, both because deep down that’s always what Arthur wants, and because the sex is the one area in which Eames still seems to be something other than... well, just, something other.

He’s still forceful, controlling, possessive, he still makes Arthur hunger and ache and boil, he makes him cry out and plead and beg; and sometimes when they’re locked together, Eames embedded deep within him, his hands gripping Arthur’s shoulders or waist or thighs, Arthur arrives at a deep euphoric place within himself, a place of complete empty surrender, where there’s only Eames and his steady encroaching need for more of Arthur, only demand and supply, only Arthur’s endless unraveling in Eames’s hands, a ball of yarn in a labyrinth with no middle, no end point, and no hope of return.

There’s no golden lightbulb moment when it occurs to him to start researching. It happens gradually, the way the catalogue in his head happened gradually. Eventually, he starts a new catalogue, this one a real-life document, only instead of cataloguing features, he scribbles down bits of information — casual things here and there, bits of trivia and detritus that Eames has dropped over the years. “I was in Chichester once,” or, “There’s a lorry service up from Kent we can use,” or, “I dated a bloke once who played minor rugby”— things that seem too insignificant to be anything but true, amid the constant lies Eames weaves about himself. Arthur’s never felt an urgent desire to dig up Eames’s past, to know something other than the Eames he first fell in love with, shadow and vapor and ephemera and all. But he collects these pieces of data, notes them with a kind of abstract resolution to see where they lead, and gradually starts picking up the scent of some kind of trail back to the before of Eames.

Eventually, when he thinks he has enough, he does some digging; and a short while later, he makes a phone call.

Captain Christopher Cumberland had, or perhaps has, a mother. She speaks in a clipped, worn voice when she answers Arthur’s questions. She’s heard them all before, and she susses out instantly that this stranger asking about her son’s strange disappearance isn’t going to be able to give her any new information on the case.

“Why are you so interested in the sightings?” she snaps after a few moments. “Have you seen my son or haven’t you?”

Arthur hesitates. The only photo he’s been able to find online of Eames’ doppelgänger is a black-and-white headshot from his military days in a unit in Kent. He vanished roughly 3 months before Eames turned up at Mal’s door with a stolen PASIV.  

The face he’s looking at is Eames’s face.

And yet, somehow, it’s not.

“What color are his eyes?” he hears himself ask.

“His eyes were a brilliant bright blue,” she answers. “You’re going to tell me that the man you’ve seen has hazel eyes.”

“I,” says Arthur, and suddenly he can’t speak for the cold spreading through his chest.

“My son is gone,” says Chris Cumberland’s mother, and she hangs up the phone.

 

 

 

Arthur has always known himself scarily well.

Terrifyingly well.

 

 

 

 

“Do you know,” he says casually a few nights later, when Eames has him bound and tied to the bed. “Male anglerfish fuse themselves to the bodies of the female in order to mate with her. They’re so consumed with lust that over time their bodies break down and become part of hers. They merge themselves into her completely.”

Eames sits back on the bed, magnificent cock on display, eyes dark with desire and predatory affection. “Say what you mean to say, pet,” he says.

“I mean,” says Arthur, baring his smile, “that I think that story’s a romance.”

Eames falls on him, kisses him through Arthur’s haze of anger and arousal, pulling Arthur against him and covering him with his still muscular body. He hisses, “Of course,” and ruts against him, pulling Arthur’s bindings taut. “I already knew that. Did you think I didn't? Why do you think I chose you?” He bites Arthur’s collarbone and grins when Arthur cries out. “It’s because I saw that in you. This need to be devoured.”  Arthur strains into him, rocks against him, and then, frustrated, yanks his own wrist restraints free with a grunt in order to wrap his arms around Eames and pull him down to the bed.

“Then if you saw me so clearly,” he gasps when they finally come up for air, “then show me who you really are.”

Eames goes very still. He slides off Arthur and sits back. “You want to see me,” he says.

“Don’t you think I deserve that, at least?” Arthur says.

Eames tilts his head. “What do you think you’ll see?” he says, voice darkening.

Arthur swallows. “You move through other people’s dreams,” he says, and as he talks a feeling of intense surreality threatens to overwhelm him. He fights against it, keeps talking. “You can shapeshift. You’re very good at seduction. You’re fond of old clothes, or at least you were when I... when you found me. You siphon away other people’s identities until they disappear.”

Eames beams at him, fond and perhaps even a little proud. “Your verdict, darling?” he says, and Arthur wonders with a faint pang if Christopher Cumberland had been the one who loved that word, if he’d been fond and flirty and touchy with his crushes until they’d fallen for him hook, line, and sinker, if he’d dropped pet names like endearments until their hearts had melted in spite of themselves, until one day he’d sunk his charming tendrils into the worst sort of prey.

“You’re some sort of incubus,” Arthur says, his voice hollow. “Maybe a lidérc.”

“The correct sub-classification,” says Eames, and suddenly there’s a new, thicker Eastern European accent in his voice that Arthur has previously only heard on rare occasions during dreams, “is _ördögszeretö_. Sometimes just _ördög_.”

“A demon.”

“A demon _lover_ ,” Eames smiles, and as he smiles, he... changes. His form shifts rapidly through several iterations of the nightmare images Arthur knows well from universal myths of nightmares and demons: the hag, the goat, the gremlin, the jinn... and then, abruptly he settles on a face and a form that seem wholly new — altogether piecemeal, in fact. It looks, somehow, like many things at once, something made from loose scraps of other myths and assembled together in a patchwork facade of a nightmare, beneath which Arthur can sense the real, unholy horror threatening to break forth.

Arthur surges up. He kisses Eames, hot and hungry and giddy with terror, letting Eames taste all his panic and need, and Eames moans and tightens his arms around Arthur, and they move and shudder against each other in an ecstasy that feels to Arthur like something infernal and blessed all at once.

  
  
  


 

It takes a while for Ariadne to realize that Eames is missing.

When she asks Arthur about it, he simply says he’s gone off somewhere — “who knows, with Eames,” he says.

“Don’t you miss him?” she says. Arthur and Eames have been together so long she has trouble thinking of them as separate people.

To her surprise, Arthur shrugs. “It’s Eames,” he says. “He is what he is.”

It takes her much, much longer, months after Eames has vanished, to feel the prickle of surprised interest that awakes within her the day Arthur turns to her and winks.

And much longer after that, on nights when they’re wrapped up in each other, lost in a haze of arousal, to recall the faint memory she has that Arthur’s eyes used to be brown.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to EGT for the beta. <3


End file.
